Revival

What do we need?  Revival

When do we need it?  Now

This country, along with the rest of the world, is growing dark.  We are becoming so distant from our God.  We are mere remnants of what used to be a strong Christian community.  We have fallen prey to the influences of evil.  Satan has disguised himself and hides among all of our desires, our lusts, our greed and our jealousy.  We are quickly becoming worshippers of money, idolater’s of status and we hunger for more.  We can’t seem to help ourselves at times, rolling into whatever the world has to offer, demanding more and more of the stuff we crave.  It may be time that we stop dead in our tracks and take a good look around us.  If we don’t do this soon, we may fail to recognize just how far we have gone.  I think it’s time for a revival.  Not the week long church services aimed at preaching fire and brimstone, but a revival of the individual soul.  We each need to re-examine our hearts to determine just where we want our lives to go. 

I was reading a book titled “The Next Christian” by Gabe Lyons.  He offers this advice.  “The first thing for the Christian is to recover the Gospel—to relearn and fall in love again with that historic, beautiful, redemptive, faithful, demanding, reconciling, all powerful, restorative, atoning, grace-abounding, soul quenching, spiritually fulfilling good news of God’s love.”  This is true revival, a new awareness of just who God is and what He means to us.  We need to discover God all over again, making Him new, making Him to be the omnipotent and all powerful Creator He is to us. 

When we place God in his rightful place in our lives, everything else begins to make more sense.  I think it’s time for revival, both an individual revival and a community or worldly revival.  It will not happen until you make the decision to change.  We cannot change the world if we are refusing to change ourselves.  We cannot expect things to get better until we are willing to improve our lives.  It’s time we made things new again. 

When I researched the word “revival,” I came across a few interesting adjectives used to describe the activities of revival.  One word stands out for me.  It is a “re-awakening.”  Now what this term means to me is that the “re” part means it has happened before.  This should not be strange territory for the Christian looking to engage the world with their beliefs.  We just need to try harder, to put forth more effort to sharing the good news in a world that is in desperate need of it.  We need to create a movement that gains momentum in the face of adversity, not one that fades into the world and becomes transparent.  But all of this can’t happen until we, as individuals, make the decision to change. 

We need revival, and we need it now. 

“in the world, not of the world”